- Chantal Hébert at the Toronto Star notes how the chaos and uncertainty around Brexit is doing much to deter support for (what I think is a better-planned) separatism in Québec.
- Ronan McCrea at Euronews suggests that, without a shift in British public opinion on Europe, there might well be many in the EU who would not welcome an end to Brexit.
- This Ekathimeri opinion piece makes the point that a final settlement of the Macedonia name dispute will allow people in Greece, North Macedonia, and elsewhere to enjoy normality across borders, hopefully within the EU.
- Atlas Obscura notes the case for making a new national park in the interior of eastern Angola, and the background of human suffering that made the park possible.
- David Fickling writing at Bloomberg suggests that some of the autarkic policies favoured for China by Xi Jinping might keep China from escaping the feared middle-income trap.
[BLOG] Some Wednesday links
Oct. 3rd, 2018 02:33 pm- Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait notes that far-orbiting body 2015 TC387 offers more indirect evidence for Planet Nine, as does D-Brief.
- Centauri Dreams notes that data from the Gaia astrometrics satellite finds traces of past collisions between the Milky Way Galaxy and the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy.
- The Crux takes a look at the long history of human observation of the Crab Nebula.
- Sujata Gupta at JSTOR Daily writes about the struggle of modern agriculture with the pig, balancing off concerns for animal welfare with productivity.
- Language Hat shares a defensive of an apparently legendarily awful novel, Marguerite Young's Miss Macintosh, My Darling.
- Lingua Franca, at the Chronicle, takes a look at the controversy over the name of the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, going up to the recent referendum on North Macedonia.
- The LRB Blog reports on the high rate of fatal car accidents in the unrecognized republic of Abkhazia.
- Reddit's mapporn shares an interesting effort to try to determine the boundaries between different regions of Europe, stacking maps from different sources on top of each other.
- Justin Petrone at North! writes about how the northern wilderness of Estonia sits uncomfortably with his Mediterranean Catholic background.
- Peter Watts reports from a book fair he recently attended in Lviv, in the west of Ukraine.
- Jason Davis at the Planetary Society Blog notes the new effort being put in by NASA into the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
- Roads and Kingdoms reports on some beer in a very obscure bar in Shanghai.
- Drew Rowsome reports on the performance artist Lukas Avendano, staging a performance in Toronto inspired by the Zapotech concept of the muxe gender.
- Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps examines the ocean-centric Spielhaus map projection that has recently gone viral.
- Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel considers the question of whether or not the Big Rip could lead to another Big Bang.
- Window on Eurasia notes the harm that global warming will inflict on the infrastructures of northern Siberia.
- Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell considers the ecological fallacy in connection with electoral politics. Sometimes there really are not niches for new groups.
- Arnold Zwicky takes part in the #BadStockPhotosOfMyJob meme, this time looking at images of linguists.
[BLOG] Some Wednesday links
Jul. 18th, 2018 01:34 pm- Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes a new image showing the sheer density of events in the core of our galaxy.
- Centauri Dreams notes the discovery of 2MASS 0249 c, a planet-like object that distantly orbits a pair of low-mass brown dwarfs.
- D-Brief notes the discovery of many new moons of Jupiter, bringing the total up to 79.
- Far Outliers looks at the appeasement practiced by the Times of London in the 1930s.
- The Frailest Thing's L.M. Sacasas contrasts roots with anchors.
- Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the controversy surrounding surviving honours paid to Franco in Spain.
- The LRB Blog looks at how the question of Macedonia continues to be a threatening issue in the politics of Greece.
- The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer suggests the new Mexican president is trying to create a new political machine, one that can only echo the more far-reaching and unrestrained one of PRI.
- Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps looks at the shifting alliances of different Asian countries with China and the United States.
- Window on Eurasia reports on the Russian reactions to a recent Politico Europe report describing Estonia's strategies for resisting a Russian invasion in depth.
[BLOG] Some Sunday links
Jul. 1st, 2018 11:48 pmMany things accumulated after a pause of a couple of months. Here are some of the best links to come about in this time.
- Anthrodendum considers the issue of the security, or not, of cloud data storage used by anthropologists.
- Architectuul takes a look at the very complex history of urban planning and architecture in the city of Skopje, linked to issues of disaster and identity.
- Centauri Dreams features an essay by Ioannis Kokkidinis, examining the nature of the lunar settlement of Artemis in Andy Weir's novel of the same. What is it?
- Crux notes the possibility that human organs for transplant might one day soon be grown to order.
- D-Brief notes evidence that extrasolar visitor 'Oumuamua is actually more like a comet than an asteroid.
- Bruce Dorminey makes the sensible argument that plans for colonizing Mars have to wait until we save Earth. (I myself have always thought the sort of environmental engineering necessary for Mars would be developed from techniques used on Earth.)
- The Everyday Sociology Blog took an interesting look at the relationship between hobbies and work.
- Far Outliers looks at how, in the belle époque, different European empires took different attitudes towards the emigration of their subjects depending on their ethnicity. (Russia was happy to be rid of Jews, while Hungary encouraged non-Magyars to leave.)
- The Finger Post shares some photos taken by the author on a trip to the city of Granada, in Nicaragua.
- The Frailest Thing's L.M. Sacasas makes an interesting argument as to the extent to which modern technology creates a new sense of self-consciousness in individuals.
- Inkfish suggests that the bowhead whale has a more impressive repertoire of music--of song, at least--than the fabled humpback.
- Information is Beautiful has a wonderful illustration of the Drake Equation.
- JSTOR Daily takes a look at the American women who tried to prevent the Trail of Tears.
- Language Hat takes a look at the diversity of Slovene dialects, this diversity perhaps reflecting the stability of the Slovene-inhabited territories over centuries.
- Language Log considers the future of the Cantonese language in Hong Kong, faced with pressure from China.
- Lawyers, Guns and Money notes how negatively disruptive a withdrawal of American forces from Germany would be for the United States and its position in the world.
- Lingua Franca, at the Chronicle, notes the usefulness of the term "Latinx".
- The LRB Blog reports on the restoration of a late 19th century Japanese-style garden in Britain.
- The New APPS Blog considers the ways in which Facebook, through the power of big data, can help commodify personal likes.
- Neuroskeptic reports on the use of ayahusasca as an anti-depressant. Can it work?
- Justin Petrone, attending a Nordic scientific conference in Iceland to which Estonia was invited, talks about the frontiers of Nordic identity.
- Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw writes about what it is to be a literary historian.
- Drew Rowsome praises Dylan Jones' new biographical collection of interviews with the intimates of David Bowie.
- Peter Rukavina shares an old Guardian article from 1993, describing and showing the first webserver on Prince Edward Island.
- Seriously Science notes the potential contagiousness of parrot laughter.
- Understanding Society's Daniel Little t.com/2018/06/shakespeare-on-tyranny.htmltakes a look at the new Stephen Greenblatt book, Shakespeare on Power, about Shakespeare's perspectives on tyranny.
- Window on Eurasia shares speculation as to what might happen if relations between Russia and Kazakhstan broke down.
- Worthwhile Canadian Initiative noticed, before the election, the serious fiscal challenges facing Ontario.
- Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell points out that creating a national ID database in the UK without issuing actual cards would be a nightmare.
- Arnold Zwicky reports on a strand of his Swiss family's history found in a Paris building.
- The Conversation takes a look at the fierce repression faced by the Macedonian language in early 20th century Greece.
- Creating an Inuktitut word for marijuana is a surprisingly controversial task. The Toronto Star reports.
- The representation of non-whites in the Afrikaans language community--the majority population of Afrikaans speakers, actually, despite racism--is a continuing issue. The Christian Science Monitor reports.
- Far Outliers considers the question of just how many different Slavic languages there actually are. Where are boundaries drawn?
- The Catalan language remains widely spoken by ten million people in Europe, but outside of Catalonia proper--especially in French Roussillon--usage is declining.
- Bulgaria and Macedonia have at last signed a treaty trying to put their contentious past behind them. Greece next?
- The legacies of Stalinist deportations in Moldova continue to trouble this poor country.
- The plight of the ethnic Georgians apparently permanently displaced from Georgia has been only muted by time.
Open Democracy's Vassilis Petsinis looks at how Macedonia's embattled president has managed to slip from pro-Western to pro-Russian camps because of his very neoconservative slipperiness.
Following the unrest in Kumanovo and the massive anti-government protests, FYR Macedonia has captivated the interest of the international press. The most recent mobilization has been the peak of a wave of discontent that commenced with the countrywide student protests some weeks ago. In the domestic front, opposition circles have issued a series of charges against the government led by the conservative VMRO-DPMNE such as: promotion of nepotism, unwillingness to combat corruption, illegitimate surveillance of political opponents and, on top of all, growing authoritarianism.
Meanwhile, political analysts have detected a certain rift in the relations between Skopje and the West which has resulted in the Macedonian government’s more decisive reorientation towards Moscow. Russia has pledged its political support to Nikola Gruevski’s and the two sides have extended their cooperation in energy issues and other areas of economic concern. Without neglecting the crucial impact of shifting geopolitics, this brief piece mostly concentrates on VMRO-DPMNE’s, predominantly, neoconservative agenda under the leadership of Nikola Gruevski. It also sets in a comparative context how this neoconservative platform has remained intact despite the gradual readjustment of the state’s foreign policy from Euro-Atlantic institutions towards Moscow’s orbit of influence.
In 2003, Nikola Gruevski succeeded Ljubčo Georgievski in the party’s leadership. An ambitious young politician back then, Gruevski’s main ambition was to centralize decision-making within VMRO-DPMNE and modernize the party’s structures.
The latter objective was achieved via the recruitment of a younger pool of cadres. Following a widespread trend all over Southeast Europe (e.g. Albania’s Edi Rama and Serbia’s Vuk Jeremić), the party’s central committee and later the Cabinet of Ministers consisted of young, aspiring and, often, Western-educated individuals (e.g. the Foreign Minister between 2006 and 2011, Antonio Milošoski). Moreover, Gruevski maintained the central aspects of Georgievski’s strategy of rapprochement vis-à-vis the ethnic Albanian community.
Despite this, Gruevski’s term in office has been marked by the emphatic endorsement of Neo-Macedonism to the detriment of the modernist narratives over the Macedonian ethno-genesis in the nineteenth century. The adoption of Neo-Macedonism became further institutionalized through the endorsement of grandiose architectural projects, largely inspired by classical antiquity, which commenced in 2010.
Leonid Bershidsky of Bloomberg View reports on Western-Russian competition in Macedonia, noting that a Russian policy that depends on weak and corrupt government is fragile.
Macedonia is a poor, landlocked Balkan country of about 2 million. To the Kremlin, it's also the newest front in an ideological battle, with the U.S. fomenting regime change to counter Russia's influence. As is often the case, that view is correct to the extent that Russian interests are aligned with those of a corrupt authoritarian ruler.
[. . .]
As for Macedonia, two months after the Turkish Stream plans were broached, the opposition leader Zoran Zaev started publishing secret recordings of officials' conversations. Zaev said the recordings, made by Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski's government as part of a sweeping surveillance operation, were handed to him by a whistleblower. The frank, and sometimes coarse, conversations cover a lot of ground, from violence against political opponents and electoral fraud to the purchase of a Mercedes for Gruevski using the Interior Ministry as cover (the interior minister, who has since resigned, is heard discussing the massage function of the car's rear seats with the chief of intelligence, who has also quit in disgrace).
Macedonians were not amused, and even the country's Albanian minority, which had never made common cause with the Macedonian opposition, joined huge rallies in the capital, Skopje. Last weekend, tens of thousands of protesters turned out in the town center, which Gruevski recently decorated with kitschy neoclassical buildings and statues at a cost the tiny nation could ill afford. On Monday, the prime minister, who has been running Macedonia for almost 10 years, staged his own counter-rally. He called the intercepts "a great lesson" and denounced Zaev as a foreign puppet with a "script writer," and called on supporters to "imagine a prime minister brought to power by foreign services."
To Team Putin, this is familiar ground: Events are following the same course as in Ukraine in 2013 and 2014, when Viktor Yanukovych's corrupt regime was ousted by a popular uprising. The Kremlin believes the U.S. fomented similar revolutions in Georgia in 2003, in Ukraine in 2005 and in Moldova in 2009 and made several less successful attempts to bring down pro-Moscow regimes in former Soviet countries. Waves of regime change such as the Arab Spring also fall under Putin's definition of U.S.-engineered revolutions. The word he uses to describe them is, curiously, the same as Gruevski's description of the incriminating recordings: "a lesson" for Russia on what to avoid.
[BLOG] Some Monday links
Oct. 27th, 2014 11:59 pm- blogTO notes that television comedian John Oliver called for Doug Ford's election, to amuse the rest of the world.
- Centauri Dreams considers philosophical considerations to SETI.
- The Dragon's Tales links to a paper simulating the tides and currents of the seas of Titan.
- Eastern Approaches notes the generally pro-European results of the Ukrainian general election.
- Far Outliers' Joel notes that dozens of Hawaiians were actively involved as combatants in the US Civil War.
- Lawyers, Guns and Money notes that upstate New York is not like Alabama.
- Steve Munro offers new mayor John Tory friendly advice on transit in Toronto.
- pollotenchegg maps the results of the Ukrainian elections.
- Spacing Toronto's John Lorinc touches upon the many issues not raised in the Toronto elections juyst concluded.
- Torontoist notes the worrying ascent of anti-Muslim sentiment in Toronto's elections.
- Towleroad looks at homophobia and violence in Serbia and Macedonia.
- The Volokh Conspiracy considers if Facebook is a secure enough means of communication for a Facebook message to be legally adequate to let a potential father know of a partner's pregnancy.
[LINK] "The Myth of the Orthodox Slavs"
Mar. 11th, 2014 08:38 pmAt Transitions Online, Bulgarian Boyko Vassilev writes against Samuel Huntington's famous arguments that Eastern Orthodox Slavs--Bulgarians, Ukrainians, Russians among others--aren't so inherently distinctive from western and central Europeans as is often claimed. At least they aren't so distinctive that Bulgarians don't aspire to the same sorts of things as others.
Different as they are, Ukraine has much in common with Bulgaria. Both are divided in their attitude to Russia – it’s just that in Ukraine the division is territorial, in Bulgaria philosophical. Both have been rocked by protests, although those in Ukraine ended with an explosion, those in Bulgaria with implosion. And both belong to a seemingly unhappy family – the Orthodox Slavs.
These countries of Slavia Orthodoxa (Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine) top the surveys for fatigue, unhappiness, and pessimism. All have low rates of fertility and high rates of crime. Some fought recent wars – and lost them. There is no spectacular business success here. Only one, Bulgaria, was not a member of either Yugoslavia or the USSR. And only one, Bulgaria again, is an EU member. Still, Bulgaria is the poorest country in the EU and is not known for its stability.
[. . .]
First, not all Orthodox Slavs are hard-line Russophiles. Serbs and Montenegrins are, but from a distance – a luxury Belarusians do not possess. Bulgarians and Ukrainians are at least divided. There, you have many people who are culturally Russophile but politically pro-Western; it is possible to love Dostoyevsky and democracy simultaneously.
Second, not all members of Slavia Orthodoxa are anti-Western; quite the contrary. Bulgarians are more pro-Western even than some fellow EU members. Even Russians have a strong pro-Western tradition. Russian historian Alexander Yanov traces it to Kyiv and Novgorod.
Third, Eastern Christians are not by nature spoiled losers; they also can prosper and flourish. “Byzantine” is not a synonym for tyranny and obedience; it marks one of the cradles of European civilization, a continuation of Rome. Misery is caused by corrupt cliques, not by the blood in your veins or the faith in your soul. Culture is not only what you inherit, but also what you acquire. In this sense, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and Russia could be free, prosperous, and democratic
This Agence France-Presse article speaks to an interesting phenomenon. Is sentiment for a Greater Albanian state including all the major Albanian-populated areas of the western Balkans actually growing?
The leaders of Albania and Kosovo vowed to achieve unity for ethnic Albanians in the region during the centennial celebration of Albania's independence in the Macedonian capital Sunday but said it should be "within EU boundaries".
"Through the European Union we are going to realise the project of our national unity," Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha told some 10,000 people in Skopje.
Berisha insisted that states bordering Albania should not fear this unity.
"I urge all the neighbours to understand that the national unity of Albanians is nothing wrong," he said, cheered by a crowd chanting "Great Albania" and waving Albanian red flags.
His words were echoed by Kosovo prime minister Hashim Thaci, who said that Albanians in the region, including the minorities in Serbia and Macedonia, were "stronger than ever and should work together."
[. . .]
No incidents were reported during the celebration, which has heightened tensions in Macedonia, prompting police to step up security and Interior Minister Gordana Jankuloska to appeal for calm amid fears of possible inter-ethnic violence.
Several incidents had been reported in recent days, with youths setting ablaze the flags of rival communities in Skopje and the Albanian-dominated northwestern town of Tetovo.
A leader of Macedonia's ethnic Albanians and former guerilla leader-turned-politician, Ali Ahmeti, whose party organised Sunday's celebration, also called for respect because "a nation that seeks its rights can not disrespect the rights of others."
[BLOG] Some Wednesday links
Nov. 14th, 2012 01:11 pm- The Burgh Diaspora's Jim Russell notes how Brazil is using the Afro-Brazilian majority legacy of the transatlantic slave trade to justify the construction of new transatlantic links with Africa.
- Crooked Timber comments upon the Irish anti-abortion laws that just cost a woman her life and the homophobia of the Reagan administration that made HIV/AIDS a laughing matter.
- Daniel Drezner wonders if the ongoing expanding Petraeus scandal will end up diminishing the American public's regard for the military.
- Eastern Approaches notes that no one in the Balkans seems to be commemorating the one hundredth anniversary of the First Balkan War.
- Far Outlier's Joel quotes from Matthew Restall's Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest to describe how Christopher Columbus was really riding on the coat-tails of Portugal's successful long-range maritime exploration.
- Geocurrents observes efforts by some Arab Christians in the Levant to revive Aramaic.
- The Global Sociology Blog reviews Laurent Dubois' Haiti: The Aftershocks of History, highlighting the extent to which Haiti's catastrophes are the products of foreign meddling.
- At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Erik Loomis maps Detroit. The extent to which the borders of the City of Detroit overlap with African-American majority populations, and to which the sprawl of Metro Detroit is constructed so as to detach the suburbs from any responsibility for the city at their region's center, is noteworthy.
- The Planetary Science Blog's Emily Lakdawalla reports on Carl Sagan's feminism.
- The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer summarizes what's going on with Uruguay's decriminalization of marijuana for personal use.
[BLOG] Some Wednesday links
Oct. 17th, 2012 12:24 pm- Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait and Centauri Dreams guest poster Lee Billings and Supernova Condensate all react joyfully to the news of the discovery of Alpha Centauri Bb (or is it B b).
- Next, at Beyond the Beyond, Bruce Sterling blogged about two prescient computer-related predictions, one describing tablet computer for children imagined in 1972 and the other revisiting the Xerox Star.
- Daniel Drezner takes a look at a study describing China's increasing tendency to apply sanctions on other countries. So far Chinese sanction use has been fairly limited.
- Eastern Approaches examines the politics of Montenegro and the potential for progress in deadlocked Greek-Macedonian relations.
- Marginal Revolution notes that a computer manufacturer owned by the father of Psy, K-Pop star famed for "Gangnam Style", is undergoing a boom in its prices.
- J. Otto Pohl argues that leftists in the developed world have a vested interest in Africa not developing and remaining abject.
- The Population Reference Bureau's blog Behind the Numbers notes a study suggesting that, contrary some predictions, a decreasing sex ratio in China and India and elsewhere doesn't strengthen the bargaining position of women but rather does the contrary.
- Torontoist notes a celebration of the one-year anniversary of Occupy Toronto.
- At the Volokh Conspiracy, historian Eric Hobsbawm's support for Stalinism is addressed in the context of the neglect of Communist crimes against humanity generally.
- The Zeds' Michael Steeleworthy fears that the new paywall of The Globe and Mail might augur--if we're not careful--an era of restricted public access to information generally.
The fact that the URL of T.J.'s post "How many building booms can one city take?" at the Economist blog Eastern Approaches is http://www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2011/03/macedonias_ethnic_disharmony (my emphasis) says everything. The Macedonian capital of Skopje is undergoing a construction boom, it seems, but everything that's turning up--monuments and houses of worship alike--is being used as material product of one ethnic conflict or another. The tensions between the Orthodox Christian Macedonians and the nominally Muslim Albanians is particularly noteworthy, although the long-standing and apparently insolvable dispute I blogged about in 2005 between Greece and independent Macedonia about the lineages of the past and complexity of modern regionalism is unending, don't worry.
None of this can end well, can it?
Skopje has long needed sprucing up. But opponents of Nikola Gruevski, who have long accused the prime minister of populist nationalism, will hardly be dissauded by the nature of the construction boom (which the government has christened Skopje 2014). With an election in the offing, Mr Gruevski will no doubt enjoy taking credit for the new structures mushrooming throughout the city centre.
In Skopje’s central square a massive plinth is being built. It will soon be topped with a huge statue of Alexander the Great. Many Macedonians could not give a fig for Alexander. But they will be delighted to see the Greeks, who have been blocking Macedonia's EU and NATO integration over an objection to the country's name, turn apoplectic with rage when it is unveiled. The Greeks accuse the Macedonians of appropriating Alexander and trying to steal their Hellenic culture.
But that is just one element. Museums, domes, a new foreign ministry, a bridge bedecked with statues of lions and [. . . ] a triumphal arch are all springing up, transforming the centre of town. Some of the buildings suit the landscape, but the new constitutional court, with its massive Corinthian columns, seems a trifle overpowering.
Skopje 2014, which we first wrote about last year, has accentuated bitter disputes between the majority Orthodox Macedonians and Muslim Albanians, who make up a quarter of Macedonia's population. Whenever someone suggests building or rebuilding a church in Skopje, the Albanians demand the same for a mosque. Tensions invariably mount.
The most vivid example brought small groups of Macedonians and Albanians to fisticuffs. Recently, a church-like steel skeleton appeared on the site of an old church inside Skopje's fortress (pictured). The authorities claimed they were merely building a museum in the shape of a church. But Albanians reply that under the original church is an older Illyrian structure; as, they say, they are descended from Illyrians, the site should be theirs. Construction has now stopped, but the issue reveals the delicate balance between Macedonia's two communities, in which religion, identity, land and power are all deeply entwined.
The erection of statues of historical figures and grandiose public buildings looks like an expression of ethnic Macedonian identity. But they are not the only ones; their structures are merely the most visible to outsiders visiting Skopje's centre. Visit Albanian districts in and around the capital and you come across hundreds of new mosques.
Macedonia’s Albanians have a reputation of being much more religious than their brethren from Albania or Kosovo. Their mosque-building has even begun to alarm Albanians from Albania, where they have been labelled as "Talibans" in television chat shows.
Yet the Democratic Union for Integration, a Macedonian Albanian party, which is in coalition with Mr Gruevski, has strictly secular roots. So one wonders whether there is a sub-plot to the mosque-building frenzy. In most cases, a new mosque declares not only the glory of Islam, but that the land on which is stands is Albanian. The paradox is that you can find Albanian-controlled town halls flying American flags a stone’s throw from new mosques sporting Saudi Arabian ones from their minarets.
This is one reason why the church-museum affair is so touchy. Many Macedonians say they keep quiet about the often illegally-built mosques for the sake of social harmony. That is why it irks them that an attempt to build something that merely resembles a church becomes a huge incident. Albanians, by contrast, see Skopje 2014 and related projects like the church-museum as a project designed to shove “Macedonian-ness” down their throats.
None of this can end well, can it?
[LINK] "Of Palaces and Politics"
Feb. 14th, 2011 10:03 amThe latest, unusual, episode of the ongoing drama over Macedonia--what is it, where is it, who has a right to claim Macedonian identity?--is described in Transitions Online by Ljubica Grozdanovska. The Macedonian government, it seems, has chosen to grant several dozen square kilometres of land to host a palace for the royal family of the Hunza people of northern Pakistan on the grounds of the latter group's claim to descent from the soldiers of Alexander the Great.
Go, read.
Around 140 kilometers southeast of Skopje, hard by the Greek border, lies the village of Paljurci.
In truth, it’s hardly a village, as no one lives here anymore. In 1908 Paljurci was attacked and burned to its foundations by Greek soldiers. Today it’s better known as the site of a dammed-up lake, and the only sign of former habitation is an abandoned well. Aside from that, the remnants of a stone wall mark the spot where the front line passed through here in World War I.
That’s all about to change. This tranquil spot, criss-crossed by armies for hundreds of years, is set to become the setting for a palace to house the royal family of the Hunza people of northern Pakistan. The Hunzas, who claim descent from the army of Alexander the Great, will get a grant of 37,000 square meters of state-owned land from the municipality of Bogdanci, in which Paljurci sits.
“We have decided to give this land as a present because they are descendants of Alexander the Great and the Hunza people feel like true Macedonians. Many citizens of Macedonia don’t feel like they belong to this country,” says Risto Ichkov, the mayor of Bogdanci and member of the ruling VMRO-DPMNE party.
The gift has the blessing of the government but has shocked many historians into near speechlessness. And opposition parties argue that it is another step in the government’s “antiquitization” of the country.
The plan is part of a search for identity that Skopje has led the nation on, with the current government insisting that Macedonians are a part of the ancient race that goes by that name, countering decades of history lessons that traced the citizens of the present-day Macedonian state to the Slavic lands of the Carpathian mountains.
Skopje has embraced – some would say expropriated – the figures of Alexander the Great and his father, Philip II of Macedon, much to the irritation of Athens.
As part of its quest, the government commissioned the huge Skopje 2014 project to remake the city into a seat of neo-classical and neo-baroque architecture. Additionally, the name of the airport was changed to Alexander the Great, while the city stadium is now the Philip II of Macedon Arena.
[. . .]
As for the claims for the Hunza royals, Alexander’s army did reach into Pakistan, but a 2006 study in the European Journal of Human Genetics seemed “to exclude a large Greek contribution to any Pakistani population, confirming previous observations.” The researchers identified Alexander’s ethnicity as Greek, and that country has its own proxy in this fight over Alexander’s far-flung descendants. In the same region of northern Pakistan, the Kalashi people also claim to be descendants of Alexander’s army. A few years ago, Greece built a cultural center there and it finances some cultural activities in order for the Kalashi people to learn more about the ancient hero.
Macedonians got their first look at the Hunza people in 2005, when journalist Marina Dojcinovska traveled to Pakistan and made a documentary about them. Since then, she has been their link to Macedonia.
Go, read.
[LINK] "'How Did We Become So Poor?'"
May. 28th, 2010 10:54 amOver at IPS News, Vesna Peric Zimonjic writes about how the peoples of the former Yugoslavia are coping with the fact that their economies collapsed so thoroughly, such that GDP per capita and income are still well below 1990 levels.
As Broadberry and Klein note in their 2008 paper "Aggregate and Per Capita GDP in Europe, 1870-2000", Yugoslavia has suffered massively. In 1990, thanks to its long history of integration with western Europe, Yugoslavia was in a relatively enviable place: GDP per capita in Serbia comparable to Poland, Croatia was well ahead of Slovakia and Hungary (31), and Yugoslavia as a whole was reasonably well positioned (27). If Yugoslavia had followed Polish growth trajectories in the 1990s and later, Yugoslavia would have the second-large economy of the new accession states, with Serbians and Vojvodinans enjoying living standards comparable to their Hungarian counterparts and Croatia being right up there not far behind the Czech Republic. Even the country's poorest regions, like Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia, would be substantially advanced. Instead, these countries have fallen far behind, and with the exception of perhaps Croatia I doubt that they'll have the chance to regain their relative positions.
Experts and analysts agree that the region, now comprising the newly independent nations or territories of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia and Montenegro, went through a "painful transition" into market economy.
It began more or less at the time when the 1991-95 wars of disintegration tore the country apart and ended a brand of relaxed socialism that had existed since the end of WW II.
Except for Slovenia, once the most developed part of former Yugoslavia and which became a member of the European Union (EU) in 2004, the economic performances of the rest are dismal when compared to 1989, a benchmark for the region.
Experts say that the processes of privatisation and transition to market economy here differed profoundly from what happened in the former East European nations after the Berlin wall fell in 1989 and that today's poverty is not a sudden event caused by recent global downturn.
"We did not see former cunning communist managers or murky international businesses being engaged in privatisation," economy analyst Misa Brkic told IPS in an interview.
"We had devastating wars, used by local elites to grab power and introduce people close to them into economy, where, as the time went by in the 90s and in this decade, they did not and could not play by market rules."
The wars left more than 120,000 people dead and economic damage worth tens of billions of dollars in devastated factories, companies, state or privately owned real estate, and in production and export losses of the former common market that collapsed.
[. . .]
Croatia and its 4.3 million people reached 69 percent of its 1989 GDP in 2003, while Serbia and its 7.3 million reached the same point only in 2009.
As for Bosnia-Herzegovina with an estimated population of 3.5 million, and its specific post-war construction of two entities, Republic of Srpska, the Serb entity, and Muslim-Croat Federation, things stand definitely worse.
As Broadberry and Klein note in their 2008 paper "Aggregate and Per Capita GDP in Europe, 1870-2000", Yugoslavia has suffered massively. In 1990, thanks to its long history of integration with western Europe, Yugoslavia was in a relatively enviable place: GDP per capita in Serbia comparable to Poland, Croatia was well ahead of Slovakia and Hungary (31), and Yugoslavia as a whole was reasonably well positioned (27). If Yugoslavia had followed Polish growth trajectories in the 1990s and later, Yugoslavia would have the second-large economy of the new accession states, with Serbians and Vojvodinans enjoying living standards comparable to their Hungarian counterparts and Croatia being right up there not far behind the Czech Republic. Even the country's poorest regions, like Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia, would be substantially advanced. Instead, these countries have fallen far behind, and with the exception of perhaps Croatia I doubt that they'll have the chance to regain their relative positions.
As Joel concludes in his latest excerpt from Mazower's history of Thessaloniki Salonica, terrorism doesn't work if you've got sufficiently determined polities as your enemies.
Most of IMRO's youthful members were not much bothered about the old disputes over dead sacred languages. What was the difference between the Greek of the liturgy and Old Church Slavonic? After all, hardly anyone understood either of them. Between these youthful secularists—whose motto was "Neither God nor Master"—and the devout supporters of the Bulgarian Exarchate a gulf emerged. Even within its own ranks, IMRO was deeply factionalized.... It might be going too far to say that IMRO was a more coherent and efficient force in the minds of its enemies than it was in reality but it certainly made little impact on the Ottoman state.
Politically IMRO was no more successful. Autonomy for Macedonia—which was the name Balkan Christians (and Europe) gave to the Ottoman vilayets of Salonica, Monastir and Uskub (Skopje)—was the goal: a "Bulgarian" governor would rule the province from Salonica, all officials would be "Bulgarian" Slavs, and Bulgarian would be an official language on an equal footing with Turkish. But faced with such a prospect, Greeks lent the support of their intelligence networks to the Ottoman authorities, and in Salonica itself Greek agents in the Hamidian police helped track IMRO sympathizers. Even more important an obstacle was the opposition of the Great Powers. Russia was now focused on central and east Asia—the conflict with Japan was only a few years away—and Britain and Austria saw the Balkans as one area where they could all work in harmony to support the status quo. They pushed—as Great Powers often will—for incremental reform rather than revolutionary change, and merely urged the Porte to take steps to improve the administration of the province.
Frustrated with the impasse which faced them, and believing that targeting the symbols of European capitalism might force the Powers to intervene, some young anarchists in Salonica took matters into their own hands, and decided to blow up the Ottoman Bank, in the European quarter. Under the influence of their beloved Russians, they called themselves the "Troublemakers," and later adopted the term "the Boatmen"—by which they identified themselves with those "who abandon the daily routine and the limits of legal order and sail towards freedom and the wild seas beyond them."...
The two surviving members of the plot, Shatev and Bogdanov, returned to Macedonia in the amnesty of 1908: Bogdanov died a few years later, but Pavel Shatev lived until 1952, becoming a lawyer in interwar Bulgaria and then minister of justice in the postwar Yugoslav republic of Macedonia.
IMRO sputtered on, although the bombers had dealt a near-fatal blow to the organization in the city. The better-known Ilinden uprising which took place on St. Elias's Day a few months later was the IMRO leadership's own anxious attempt to arouse a peasant revolt against Turkish rule. But its chief consequence was that several thousand more Christian peasants were killed by Ottoman troops in reprisal. The only success IMRO could claim after this series of bloody failures was a further diplomatic intervention by the Great Powers—their last significant involvement in the tangled Macedonia question before the Balkan Wars. The Ottoman authorities were forced to swallow the appointment of European officials to supervise the policing of the province. Among the younger army officers stationed there, resentment and a sense of humiliation led to the first stirrings of conspiracy against the Porte. On the other hand, Macedonia remained part of the empire and Hilmi Pasha continued as inspector-general. The one conclusion to be drawn from the rise and fall of IMRO was that ending Ottoman power in Europe would not come that way: the use of terrorism to embroil and involve the Great Powers was futile when the Powers upheld the status quo.
Vesna Peric Zimonjic's IPS article highlights the fact that the recent acquisition of European Union by Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia has a very unequal effect on the region.
Before 1991, former Yugoslavs enjoyed visa-free travel since the mid-1960s, unlike the nations of what used to be communist Eastern Europe. Generations of Serbs grew up travelling freely abroad, but the young now are almost completely unaware of the benefit.
"It was ok to go to Italy for a weekend when I was young," Bogdan Stevovic (54), a Belgrade teacher, told IPS. "However, my 19-year-old son does not know what it looks like. For a week's holiday in Greece he had to queue the whole night in front of the Greek embassy just to submit his visa request in the morning."
[. . .]
[Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo] were omitted from the EC list for visa-free travel. "These countries have not yet fulfilled the conditions," the EC said in its statement. That meant they had not introduced biometric passports, secured their borders or engaged in a fight against organised crime. Visa-free travel for them could be re-examined by mid-2010, the EC statement said.
There was fierce reaction in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where the EC move was viewed as a political message primarily for Bosniak Muslims, who are the largest ethnic group, that suffered the biggest losses in the 1992-95 war, mostly at the hands of Bosnian Serbs.
"It's further discrimination against us Bosniaks," Sarajevo resident Mirsad Juzbasic told IPS on the phone. "It's a shame after what happened here during the war. We'll remain in a kind of a ghetto."
It's different for Bosnian Croats and Serbs. Both are able to obtain passports from their ethnic mother countries, meaning they can hold dual Bosnian and Croat, or Bosnian and Serb citizenship.
Many Bosnian Croats opted for Croatian passports as far back as the mid- 1990s because Croatia was exempt from the visa introduction in 1991.
Bosnian Serbs have realised now that it's easy for them to obtain Serbian passports. "The only problem is we have to wait for Serbian citizenship for 15 months," Jelena Stojkovic (24) told IPS on phone from Banja Luka, capital of Republika Srpska, the ethnic Serb entity within Bosnia. "But it will be good for us. We can see what Europe looks like now."
Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, who declared independence in what Serbia officially considers its southern province in February 2008, are regarded by Serbia as its citizens, but Serbia is unable to provide biometric passports because it has no jurisdiction over the province – even if the ethnic Albanians would want to travel on a Serbian passport.
[PHOTO] Alexander the Great Parkette
May. 19th, 2009 11:01 amLocated on the corner of Logan and Danforth in the heart of Toronto's Greektown, the Alexander the Great Parkette was opened in 1994, just down the street from a Macedonian cultural centre. The timing suggests to me that it may have something to do with the ongoing dispute over the name "Macedonia" between Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.
[LINK] "Ghost Towns"
Jan. 9th, 2008 02:29 pmOver at Transitions Online, Ljubica Grozdanovska has an article up ("Ghost Towns") that takes a look at the accelerating phenomenon of rural depopulation in the Republic of Macedonia.
According to the State Statistical Bureau, half a century ago, 20 villages in Macedonia had fewer than 50 inhabitants. Today, there are 458 villages with fewer than 20 people living in them. There are 147 village that have no residents at all.
The draining of populations began soon after World War II and lasted for several decades. Government officials and economic developers in the newly formed Peoples Federative Republic of Yugoslavia – later the Socialistic Federative Republic of Yugoslavia – devised plans to stimulate the economy. They focused their attentions on developing mining, textile, and metal industries in lucrative regions and municipalities, most of which already showed signs of urban growth.
In turn, the government ignored the needs of rural, agriculture-based villages in order to save money for investment in new sectors, free up land for industrial complexes, and encourage laborers to move to newly growing areas.
With investments sent elsewhere, many villages were cut off from civilization. The government allowed roads to degrade, communication channels to disconnect, schools and hospitals to close, and electricity to shut off. Consequently, people in the villages moved to faster-growing areas to escape low standards of living.
[. . .]
According to a paper presented to the European Association of Agricultural Economists in 2001, Macedonia’s rural population in 1948 was roughly 72 percent. By 1981, the number had dropped to 46 percent. By 1994, it had hit 40 percent.